Mains extension block; he heard the difference, but were his ears deceiving him?

28 February 2018

I've never been the type to worry about cables, power chords or separate spurs and that malarkey. Mainly because the system generally sounds fine as it is, I'm not made of money and I also don't have the time to be constantly ABX testing these things to make sure I'm not getting 'snake-oiled'.

However last night I had a play around with the extension lead that my system gets its power from. The reason was I've been having a bit of trouble with pitch instability on a Roksan Radius 5 that was largely sorted out by changing the platter. However some wow is still evident on decaying piano and guitar notes and I thought I'd try a few different power configurations based on a hypothesis that current fluctuations could be affecting the synchronous motor.

First thing I noticed was the turntable has been plugged into the 6th position away from the lead in a 6-gang extension up to now. I'll have to do more listening to make sure I'm not fooling myself, but I'm sure the pitch instability had gone when I changed it all round so that the TT was plugged directly into a wall socket. I even think moving the TT plug to the first position on the extension lead reduced the pitch instability I was hearing as did using a far higher quality extension lead that I had lying around (but that doesn't have enough sockets for my system).

Unfortunately plugging the TT direct into a wall socket as a permanent arrangement is impossible due to practicalities of living in a family house and not wanting unsightly leads running everywhere.

I'm therefore thinking of buying a high quality extension lead for the system and paying a bit of attention to which order the units are plugged in to see if that can improve my vinyl playback.

Do any of you with more experience than me of this sort of thing think there's any logic to any of that? Like I say, I'm all too aware that my ears may be deceiving me and it all could be a complete waste of time.